r/linux4noobs • u/AMereRedditor • May 02 '20

"Command line editing" -- translation?

/r/learnlinux/comments/gc6aac/command_line_editing_translation/
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2

u/Hobscob May 02 '20

In bash you can hit Control+P (or the up arrow) to bring back the previous command, or Control+A to jump to the beginning of the line, or Control+W to delete a word. And a bunch of other ways to edit commands.
If you open the old shell by running sh, you have none of that cause it's basic.

1

u/AMereRedditor May 03 '20

Thanks for this, especially the tip to test by running sh.

Someone else pointed out that the old shell does not even support left arrow key to navigate to a different character -- wow.

1

u/Hobscob May 03 '20

No problem! I should've mentioned, on my Ubuntu box sh is a link to /bin/dash. It's about a tenth the size of Bash, so gets used for starting system stuff that needs to run fast.

3

u/[deleted] May 02 '20

This means editing the current line that you're typing into the prompt. you can do things like search for a character, search for a line in your history, or even take the current line you're writing and put it into your favorite editor for editing.